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Plans for one of the world's first electronic computers rescued from trash heap
Work is underway to reconstruct what could be regarded as the direct ancestor of the personal computer we know today—following the recent discovery of detailed circuit diagrams that were about to be sent to the scrap heap.
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The 19 diagrams have been turned over to a team trying to rebuild the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), the world's first practical, general purpose computer, Phys.org reported.
Andrew Herbert, who is heading the reconstruction work, said EDSAC - built in Cambridge University and which ran its first program in 1949 - was the first computer built for other people to use to solve real problems.
"Very few artefacts of EDSAC remain. However, these papers give a clue as to why a few, such as a chassis, do exist," Herbert said.
Designed by Sir Maurice Wilkes, EDSAC had some 3,000 valves in 12 racks - and consumed a whopping 12 kilowatts of power.
The reconstruction project began in 2011 and is to be completed in late 2015.
Circuit diagrams
Phys.org said the 19 circuit diagrams showed how EDSAC changed as it was assembled and tested.
"(E)lements that were modified after the machine was up included redesigning the circuitry to get stronger signals and improvements to the instruction set and error correction in order to distinguish programming errors from machine malfunction," it said.
The report noted the diagrams, following their rescue, were given to the EDSAC team at Bletchley Park.
Project
Citing Cambridge News, Phys.org said John Loker, a former engineer at Cambridge University's Mathematical Laboratory, recently visited the National Museum of Computing and learned about the reconstruction plan.
"I started work as an engineer in the Maths Lab in 1959 just after EDSAC had been decommissioned. In a corridor there was a lot of stuff piled up ready to be thrown away, but amongst it I spotted a roll of circuit diagrams for EDSAC. I'm a collector, so I couldn't resist the urge to rescue them," he said. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News
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